Handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and mobile phones, are now being equipped with hardware and software to handle several different computing tasks. Handheld devices are being equipped with communications adapters to allow the handheld devices to access the Internet and information handling systems, such as other handheld devices. Handheld devices are also being used to process multimedia data, such as audio and video data. Many handheld devices are capable of playing video. Handheld devices are being integrated with more components to handle the increased functionality. However, as more components are integrated with the handheld devices, and as processing capabilities increase, the handheld devices draw more power.
Power is limited on most handheld devices, unlike most desktop computers that take power from a power supply connected to an alternating current (AC) power outlet and generally don't need to worry about conserving power. Handheld devices generally take their power from standard power cells. Because handheld devices are designed to be small and light to make them portable for consumers, their power cells are generally selected to be small and light to not hinder the portability of the device. However, the increased processing needed to handle new functionality, such as communications or multimedia playback, takes more power than general processing tasks for which the handheld devices were originally intended.
Current methods of reducing power consumption are not adequate. For example, during a screen refresh mode in a handheld device with a liquid crystal display (LCD), external memory used to store image data for an LCD controller continues to consume power. Power for the handheld device can be reduced by utilizing internal memory associated with the LCD controller; however, the size of the internal memory may not be adequate to store the image data. Furthermore, increasing the size of the internal memory is costly due to the amount of area used by the internal memory as well as the amount of power to be consumed by a larger memory unit. From the above discussion, it is apparent that an improved method of conserving power within a system would be useful.